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Date: 1867-06-14
By: True Witness
Citation: “Englishmen, are sometimes apt to wonder, why all the world cannot be comfortably governed on the principles of the British Constitution.”, True Witness (14 June, 1867)
Other formats: TBA

“ Englishmen, are sometimes apt to wonder, why all the world cannot be comfortably governed on the principles of the British Constitution.”—Montreal Gazette, 5th inst.

They must be very stupid Englishmen indeed, who thus wonder, with more beef in their bellies, than brains in their heads. The thing that would be really wonderful would be the success of the principles of the British Constitution in a community amongst whom did not exist the social elements from which that Constitution arose, and with which it is indissolubly associated, so that the destruction of the former would inevitably entail the death of the latter. The fundamental principle of the British Constitution is that of Government by the “Estates of the Realm”; that is to say King—Lords, Spiritual and Temporal — and Commons; and where any one of these Estates does not exist, or exists only in a feeble decrepid state, there it would be as impossible to reproduce the faintest imitation of the British Constitution, as it will be for the Yankees to cultivate with success sugar, cotton and tobacco, in their newly acquired Polar Territory, called Walrussía.

And even now, in these our days, and in England, the British Constitution is fast becoming an anomaly, incompatible with the new ideas which are intolerant of its fundamental principle—that is to say Government by the Estates of the Realm, or in other words class-government. The new idea is, that there are, or at all events should be, no distinct Estates or classes within the realm; but, that the entire social body should be fused down, till it become one uniform, homogeneous mass, or people. When this process shall have been accomplished, there will no longer be Estates in the Realm; no reason, or principle therefore for the existing British Constitution, which will have to give place to another Constitution founded on a principle in harmony with the new social order. Whether this shall be accomplished suddenly and violently, or whether the process shall be more gentle and gradual,—an euthanasia rather than a cataclysm,—we do not venture to predict; but in either case the result will be Revolution, or organic change, and all organic change in the political order presupposes death.